Peacekeepers are too often deployed where schools and jobs were missing years earlier. As a candidate for UN Secretary-General, President Macky Sall places the link between peace and development at the centre of his proposals.
Crises that build slowly. The crises the Security Council takes up rarely arise overnight. They grow where the state has withdrawn and where the young have found neither work nor prospects, long before the guns speak.
The cost of emergency. Keeping the peace through heavy operations costs more than the investments that would have preserved it. That spending comes late, and at a high price, once the crisis has already broken out.
Prevention through development. Lasting peace is built with the tools of development: a road, a school, a clinic, a job hold a region more surely than a contingent.
Two agendas to join. No peacekeeping operation has ever replaced the state it came to stand in for, and yet the Organization has kept the peace agenda apart from the development agenda for too long. The Secretary-General can join the two and put prevention before intervention.
Experience in government. Twelve years as head of state and the chairmanship of the African Union in 2022 ground this approach to peace through development. They explain why the vision statement filed with the United Nations, which conceives peace, security and development together in its first pillar, frames its proposals as obligations.
Africa at its heart, the world in its sights.
The United Nations' work on peace and development is public. Read all public positions at www.mackysall.net